Detrola

Reincarnate;
2006

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Warn Defever is the kind of musician who seems to stand in the corner, speaking very quietly, surrounded only by those who most want to listen. His records-- 15 years' worth of them-- feel, above all, private. Some of that privacy comes from genre and style: The music can be dreamy and abstracted, qualities that once made His Name Is Alive a natural fit for the arty English label 4AD. More often, though, it's down to Defever's singular approach to recording, always several degrees off from the conventions of normal pop. The drums hide away, like in pre-rock recordings; they add rhythm but rarely drive the whole. The instruments sound neither glossy nor raw, natural nor artificial; mostly they're just quiet, minimized, almost pious. The air around them-- and there can be plenty of it-- seems strangely empty, the same way winter snow can deaden all noise. And then there's the treatment of voices, almost always those of
women, foregrounded above all else, and treated so that they feel like
someone is singing softly right in your ear-- in calm, repetitive,
uncomplicated chants. The effect is such that it's hard to imagine anyone listening to this music when not alone. Couples, maybe. Crowds, parties-- how?

The amazing thing, then, is that Defever's musical world is anything but insular, anything but stuck in that corner. Some of his influences are unsurprising: The slurry, ghostly pop His Name Is Alive made for 4AD has run toward shoegazing and electronics, Beach Boys worship, and dub experiment. Some of the other sources are more remarkable than Defever gets credit for. He grew up in the orbit of Detroit and learned guitar from his grandfather; he has old-time music in him, not as a curiosity but as a presence: folk, country, blues, and gospel, from 1950 backward. The fact that his project is no longer with that arty English label may even have something to do with their last two albums-- on which Defever quietly and unselfconsciously set about making collections of blues and soul music. None of this is pastiche, or dabbling, or borrowing styles-- each of these threads winds its way naturally into that private world. You probably wouldn't hear a His Name Is Alive song and describe it as "blues"; you'd spend hours with it before realizing how strange it would be to call it anything else.

All of this is truer than ever on Detrola, the group's first full-length in four years, and their first since leaving 4AD. Every one of those sounds runs through here, woven together so naturally that the weaving itself is the furthest thing from the listener's mind: This sounds like absolutely nothing but a His Name Is Alive record, and one too shockingly good to go thinking much about constituent parts.

Its bookends are dirges, laments-- a fiddled spiritual on "Introduction" ("The darkest night I ever saw was the night I left my love") and folk blues on "I'll Send My Face to Your Funeral" ("I've seen too many things I couldn't stand to see"). In between, the most remarkable things happen. There's the same lulling, hypnotic tone that's always made the band an indie affair-- the same soft-spoken beauty as fellow private types like Red House Painters. But there's plenty more. "After I Leave U" makes pop from synthesizers that's anything but synth-pop; too brittle and strange, and too natural, so that the eventual appearance of a vocorder still feels fiercely alien. "Seven Minutes" is brittle r&b, shot through with free-jazz saxophone runs, as voiced by Lovetta Pippen, one of three women singing on this record. "Get Your Curse On", the record's emotional peak, is also its uplift, a swinging piano-pop bounce that feels like Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick in a sexual battle of wills: They defend ("Your ju-ju comes in short supply/ Your curse won't work on me this time") and they attack ("I could turn you on so fast/ Your heart, your heart, your hands, your hands").

It's a short record-- just under 40 minutes-- and better for it; the second half sweeps you effortlessly along to that final dirge. "C*A*T*S" is electro-pop hypnosis, shuffling along on two chords, mutating drum breaks, and meowing synths. "You Need a Heart" shoots back to the sweet, delicate sonic candy of 1996's Stars on ESP, the peak of Defever's Beach Boys fixation. "I Thought I Saw", closer to the start, is doing either Memphis soul or Steely Dan southern-California studio action; it hardly seems to matter which.

What matters is that Defever is doing exactly what we've always claimed to want from musicians. His world is his own, unique and uniquely stylized, describable less in terms of genre and more in terms of impressions: snow, transistor radios, empty rooms, sepia tones, dreams. More importantly, his world is large: There are wide ranges of the history of American music in here, whether exhibited or just acknowledged. He's cloistered, but he's not a solipsist. On Detrola, the music feels as private as ever; you'll come to this exhibit one at a time, and it's still too particular in its tastes to imagine a large audience for it. But it's fantastic art, full of depth and warmth and creativity. It's probably the best thing Defever's ever done.